Eat breakfast like a king; eat lunch like a queen; eat dinner like a pauper.
If we lived by this adage, we would be healthy and thriving. We would also be skinnier! "How can this happen?" you ask.
We are technically supposed to eat a big breakfast to "break the fast" of overnight abstinence. That's what breakfast means. At the turn of the century, breakfast consisted of fresh eggs, homemade buttermilk biscuits, bacon, pork chops, unpasteurized butter, and unpasteurized milk. That was a common breakfast. When Kellogg's introduced us to cereal, we went from a nutritious breakfast to a bowl of cereal on the run. Cereal revolutionized breakfast; but also, in my opinion, sent us on a downhill spiral.
Today we wake up, grab a cup of coffee and a bran muffin or fruit, and run to the office. At eleven o'clock we're hungry, so we grab a bagel and another cup of coffee; by one o'clock we're hungry, but hey, we are supposed to eat because that's lunch, right? So we go to lunch and we eat the bread while we are ordering. And perhaps we even order pasta. Then we are hungry at four, so we have a candy bar, and finally we go home and eat a big relaxing meal with family or friends and go to bed.
Does this sound even vaguely familiar? Are you doing some kind a version of this scenario? If you kind of see yourself, then I'm going to tell you why you should stop this insanity!
We need to eat a big breakfast - even make this the social meal of the day - because we run all day on the food that we feed our body with in the morning. We shouldn't be hungry at eleven o'clock; at lunchtime we still should not be hungry because we should be nutritioned enough that we don't feel like eating lunch, but know that we need to eat lunch.
What does this mean? What it means is that it's better to actually eat lunch when you're not hungry so you can choose with your head (i.e. smart) instead of with your stomach (i.e. from hunger). When you choose while being hungry, you usually choose some kind of sugar. What's wrong with that?
What's wrong with choosing from your stomach is that you choose carbohydrates or sugars - not only is nothing in the body built from carbohydrates and sugars, but they burn off quickly in terms of energy (not cellulite) and leave you hungry again at 4 PM. So at 4 PM, yet again the body calls for quick energy - sugar. So you have a candy bar.
I know most people say, "Well, I listen to my body." We might be listening to our body, but we are not hearing or deciphering correctly what the body is asking for. When the body asks for sugar, it's because it's depleted. It needs energy and it needs it quickly. So when your body calls for sugar, it's because you actually haven't fed it well to begin with.
So listening to your body (if we decipher it correctly) means, "Feed me properly all the way along and I won't be calling for sugar at 11 AM and 4 PM during the day." Oh, but this isn't as much fun as eating sugar is it? Then we go home and have a really big dinner because, well, we really haven't eaten all day; I mean, how could we have eaten if we're hungry? How quickly we forget what we've eaten all day.
So because we've forgotten most of the things we put in our mouth during the day - and I do mean the things we forget that we take while passing by the craft table, like popping a candy or going by the break room and eating a cookie, or that coffee with sugar, or the rest of that muffin left over from breakfast - we feel like we haven't eaten all day because none of that sugar stays with you. So we are entitled to a nice big dinner, which we sit down and eat, then probably go to bed.
Here's the problem with that: the body should be recuperating and repairing and relaxing overnight. Not stressing to make enzymes to digest food. And if my body can repair and rejuvenate overnight if it is fed minimally right before I go to bed, then you better believe that's what I'm going to do to stay slim, anti-age, and to stay healthy. Because the body can do all that on its own. I mean, it can do all that on its own if we help it by eating correctly.
So our cycle is backwards. The point of having such a big breakfast with lots of protein is this:protein takes 4 to 5 hours to digest. So in the morning by having eggs, bacon, pork chops, unpasteurized butter, and unpasteurized milk, our forefathers were eating huge amounts of proteins and fat. Buttermilk biscuits were a little bit of a carbohydrate. So the carbohydrate you use for energy in the moment, and the proteins fuel you for the rest of the day.
Granted, our forefathers worked in the fields so they needed huge amounts of food. But the point is that we still need proteins and fats to start the day. Maybe not in such big amounts, but that's what we need. Preferably these fats are raw fats and the proteins are raw proteins so that the body can utilize them quickly and cleanly. When I say quickly and cleanly, I certainly do mean without leaving any residue behind to make us fat. Raw fats and raw proteins burn the cleanest - they even in some cases actually work to make you thinner. They are the ideal breakfast, the ideal lunch, and the ideal dinner with some carbohydrates from veggies mixed in.
Oh, whoops! Did I just give you the ideal diet?
The Russians weren't wrong when they said: Eat breakfast alone; Eat lunch with a friend; Eat dinner with an enemy. What this means is: you should eat your whole breakfast by yourself because you need a lot of food, share your lunch with someone you love because you both need a moderate amount of food, and eat dinner with an enemy because you should force the food on him because a big dinner is deadly.
Those Russians, huh?
